I just have a conversation and ask them to tell me about a favorite code project they've worked on. Could be school project, previous job, whatever.

And just let them talk about it. I'll prod for more detail if I need to give a little nudge. Ask about problems they solved when doing it, etc.

The _only_ thing that I'm looking for in this process is whether or not the person is truly interested what they're doing. This comes through when talking about something they're excited to have worked on, seemingly small problems that they had to really work to solve, etc. Geeking out, if you will.

The single most important trait I've seen in programmers that I've worked with over the years is "level of interest". There's too much that you have to learn on a daily basis to be successful in this field. If you're not interested in learning new things and finding solutions to the problems that you encounter, you're not going to make it very far.

Beyond that and basic competence in the core skills that the job requires, I don't look for much more.

Thus far, everybody I've ever hired who has passed this little conversational test has been an excellent team member.

My approach has just been to have a conversation, and try to move it along naturally. What do you think of concepts? What useful STL did they add? Why did you go with this design? Ask me something.

If the person doesn't really have the level of interest required, they will run out of things to say. Like a cave left unexplored. The good candidates will go down all the caves with you, even if they don't quite know what's there.

In particular, the times I've had dud hires it was not possible to know from the standard fare of coding questions and IQ questions. When I was doing that obviously the people I hired passed. But for instance one guy really didn't want to be a programmer, he just knew how to answer the questions. He ended up stalling on his first assignment, and eventually decided to change careers. Another dud also lacked motivation, perhaps because he was asked to do something not quite in his area to begin with. He ended up not doing anything at all.

Apart from those two, dozens of others have turned out ok. I never ran into that guy who couldn't do FizzBuzz, despite not asking. I also don't think it was all that bad to let go of the duds within a quarter, they never got so ingrained in the team that we depended on them, and they could plausibly move on to another job without mentioning us on their CV.

I was a hiring manager for 25 years, and this was exactly what I did.

I made very, very few mistakes, and actually had some pleasant surprises.

How do you know? How often did you follow up on rejections to see whether they should have been hires?

The only one that made me sad, was a chap who used to show up on the Adobe Photoshop splash page. We offered, he declined.

In the aggregate, I think things turned out OK for all of us. There are some folks that I have to admit, probably did best by not accepting us.

Yeah, I hear that. I remember interviewing someone who was _good_, but not at this narrow thing that we were hiring for. She seemed SO hopeful that we would give her an offer, I wanted to tell her directly "this job is going to waste 6 mo of your life and offer you nothing I return"

He turned out to be an amazing hire. I think that he far outstripped the first choice, and he has gone on to do quite well, after leaving our company.

I like to think that I ran a fairly good shop. We kept people for decades.

When they finally rolled up our shop (after 27 years), the person with the least seniority had ten years.

Look for curiosity, interests and blend them with your product.

This also lets you take chances on engineers that weren’t “perfect” but had a lot of positives to offer.

When you're a startup that nobody's heard of, half your engineers are going to be junior, and half your comp is stock options that will probably never be liquid, the offer doesn't make any sense. Are you just going to give offers to 20 random new college grads and coding bootcamp alums planning on firing the 50-75% that don't cut it? Good luck ever getting junior people to accept offers again. Do you think someone with 10+ years of experience is going to take a pay cut to take the job with a random startup with a decent chance of getting let go if the manager isn't feeling it after a few weeks?

With 15 years of experience and a family to provide for, there's no world where I'd consider that type of hiring/firing culture for anything other than a proven brand name with top of market comp, environment, and coworkers. Did an interview loop w/ Netflix a couple years ago, seems like an amazing place to work, ultimately went a different direction for non-culture related reasons.

This kind of mentality is not conducive to a well-functioning nation with people who have dependents and need stability.

The nation is not conducive to business if it can't provide healthcare and safety nets for those without work or in between jobs. In the US we are held hostage with healthcare based on our employers - if you're even lucky enough to have a stable job with benefits.

Less of an issue if you're full remote, or you provide good accommodations, I guess.

Unemployment is bad for society generally and for the unemployed. Maybe one day we’ll get to fully automated luxury gay space communism but France is not there. Those extra unemployed people are having their talents and productivity wasted by economic mismanagement.

The problem is of course that even if you have every reason to think that some other place would hire you, you need a degree of slack to begin with. There aren't any easy answers there, but that's where I'd say an expanded social safety net should come in.

I think a generous severance makes up for that. Plus people would know what they are getting into, just like Netflix. If you don’t want the risk/return you don’t have to apply or accept a job there.

I don't think so.

> I think a generous severance makes up for that.

That's your opinion. But what you think is generous isn't necessarily what others think is generous.

> Plus people would know what they are getting into, just like Netflix.

I disagree.

> If you don’t want the risk/return you don’t have to apply or accept a job there.

The risk/return needs to be clear though and hirefast/firefast isn't always clear.

Incredible hiring risk aversion is what makes finding a job for everyone a shitshow. Definitely not an efficient market as it stands.

If it weren’t for an easy to hire organization that gave me a chance, I’d likely be homeless.

Unfortunately this cuts at the moat that big corporations have set up not to mention health insurance industry and big pharma. Which is why it hasn't happened yet here (though it has in many other countries).

Surely companies have some minimal responsibility to act ethically, and surely behaving in a way that causes social dysfunction is not ethical.

By your reasoning, I am free to degrade public infrastructure such as roads because it is not my responsibility to build them.

Equivalently: I am morally justified in committing crimes since I am not a police officer.

A civilization enforces responsibility through the law.

>I am free to degrade public infrastructure such as roads because it is not my responsibility to build them.

Yes. And either the government should set laws to prevent you from misusing the infrastructure, and/or the people should shun your company for being a bad actor. The former being consistent for infrastructure that is owned and maintained by the tax-funded government.

>I am morally justified in committing crimes since I am not a police officer.

Morality and legality are different things. Neither people nor corporations should be judged by the government through the abstract, subjective morality of individuals, only by agreed upon, written law, and at its loosest which is a court's interpretation of the law.

You as an individual can hold anyone responsible for anything under any criteria, but then you should state you're speaking for yourself as per your own moral code. As a society, we have rules for that.

If you want to make your moral code the law, then that should also be explicitly mentioned as such instead of speaking as if it's the status quo.

It seems we agree. Similarly, governments should encode the civic responsibility of businesses into law.

Whether or not they have actually done that is a different debate.

To me, this seems like a very cynical scheme. We tell "normal people" that they, personally, ought to BUY AMERICAN to prevent jobs from moving abroad. When they eventually do, we can tell them they should've done more and that it was their fault. It shifts the liability on to the victims, rather than the perpetrators.

But the responsibility of ensuring that a country has a good trade deficit is upon the government, if anyone! There's no serious way I can prevent it, so the only real point of saying it's my responsibility is to diminish the government's responsibility for failing to prevent it.

To suggest that the companies have a moral obligation, is to suggest that an abstract body corporate can have a conscience. If it could, there would be no need to ban slavery - just expect that the honest businessmen of America cease to traffic in them.

We agree. We also agree that businesses do not have the responsibility of fixing society.

However, they do have the responsibility not to degrade it.

Companies are inert objects. They do not have consciences. I can't say that a company does an evil thing, any more than I can blame a rock someone else threw for hitting my head. It hurts, but I can't very well blame the rock for it. Companies are just like driftwood in the ocean; their motion is defined solely by the forces acting upon them.

What is left, then, is to suggest that society should go after the companies that don't do what we want. But this can never be done by individuals. It has to be done by unions, governments, or something of the sort. It cannot be done by the companies themselves, and it cannot be done by individuals.

When you suggest that companies are doing something wrong, and not the government for failing to regulate them, this is tantamount to suggesting that the responsibility for punishing them actually lay on the individual. But to do so makes the primary victim into the perpetrator of the aggression against him. It is a terrible thing to do.

The only major problem would be relocation, so I'd suggest working a few months at a new job before relocating for it.

There’s no silver bullet when it comes to hiring.

Let's focus on solving problems in america for american citizens first, then we can worry about everyone else.

> This also lets you take chances on engineers that weren’t “perfect” but had a lot of positives to offer.

This is not true. An AS/HFA/Autistic person wouldn't survive very long at Netflix, because they biologically struggle with the goal-setting/performance review game. These individuals may have talents that are biologically unavailable to neurotypical people.

The Netflix approach selects for a very specific type of individual: an extreme degree of rote knowledge and the ability to effortlessly apply that knowledge. There are people who acquire this knowledge and talent via unconventional means, and Netflix is able to grab those people up.

In addition, that individual is likely wasting mental resources gaming performance reviews, or their manager has identified their struggle and is protecting them from the ceremony. Systematically, Netflix is not equipped to deal with them.

You can find out that this is a false equivalency in DSM IV. Spectrum individuals struggle with certain executive functions, and performance reviews align incredibly well with those metrics.

You've claimed the anagolous equivalent of "everyone gets tired climbing stairs, paraplegics are no different."

> opine

I hate to tu quoque, but I'm one of those individuals and I do struggle with performance reviews - as would most (not all) adult diagnosed individuals. Literally page 5 of my AS/HFA workbook. I'm lucky to be managed by someone who gives me qualitative reviews, instead of quantitative ones.

It’s not like the population of people who take performance reviews seriously rather than as bullshit hoops that have to be endured or gamed is large.

- what is the shortest time they keep you before firing you? 1 week? six weeks? 2 months...?

- I suppose that the level of internal documentation must be stellar. Can someone comment on this?

I was asked to bring in my laptop with some code I had written. I did, we talked about it. The interviewer asked me to add a simple feature. It's code I was familiar with (as you would be after working for a company for a bit). So no stress. No gotchas.

No time wasted with yet another technical test with a throwaway app. Setting up a new project is always a bit of a faff.

Admittedly not everyone will have some code ready, but then a normal take home test would be the fallback.

My thoughts exactly while reading the article.

These hiring articles are a huge pointless waste of time.

I work with 8 other senior or senior-ish engineers, we are all basically taking a slight paycut (not too much, maybe 80-90% of rates we might get elsewhere) to work for a non-profit making interesting stuff for kids, and everyone is genuinely nice and fairly hard-working.

I wonder if the "taking a paycut to do something actually interesting and worthwhile" is part of it.

I agree with your assessment of the pros/cons of the various interview methods. I agree that there is no right answer.

I think you've done a good job identifying the most common options. Since none has proven decisively better than any other at aiding hiring decisions, how about letting the candidate decide which sort of interview to participate in?

Some personalities are better suited for programming, although I think hard work can overcome anything.

I remember an old blog post [0] of mine that used Hammerstein-Equord personality quadrants of smart/industrious, smart/lazy, stupid/industrious, stupid/lazy and describing it for how that effects tech team planning.

[0] http://www.prepend.com/2009/05/programmer-classifications-by...

I am not sure about the hard work part. Some people don't seem to think the right way for programming.

I studied a one year IT masters conversion course back in the dot com boom, and chose the best / hardest course I could find. The first 3 weeks of the course was an intensive Java programming course. There was an exam at the end of this. They suggested that anyone who didn't pass this exam, don't do the rest of the course, but they didn't actually force them off. I was friends with at least two people that failed that exam, but continued anyway. They struggled and I don't think they passed the final exam despite plenty of hard work.

I’ve worked with people who didn’t care at all, it was a job, but they studied and worked hard and were pretty good.

Of course, I’d rather work with someone who had both.

And many flaws in the 7 aren't intrinsic flaws, instead it is flaws of the wrong "one size fits all" application:

> Looking at past work experience misses brilliant junior programmers coming out of college.

yeah, don't use that as negative for junior programmers coming out of college.

>Take-home assignments bias towards people who have lots of free time, and still don't really tell you how that person works with others.

the same, if candidate prefers that way - let them, if not - use other approach

etc.

Even more so for a person who can't play video games, e.g. blind people. Many of the other interview techniques, for all their faults, at least don't (inadvertently) discriminate against people with disabilities.

There's also a "similar game" advantage. For instance, a person who played games like OpenTTD before will have a much easier time with Factorio rail signals, since the two kinds of rail signals in Factorio work very similarly to two of the several kinds of rail signals found in OpenTTD.

I don't understand this. Why instead play a game, which, as you said, could have disadvantages because there are people that do play and people who've never played. I guess the thinking goes that by easing into a game you can see clear behaviors of people. But you can also try to ease them into coding while you are looking over their shoulder. The interviews I do, and I've seen done at my previous company and the one I'm currently at, it is similar to pair programming, and yes, there is people that is super nervous at the beginning, and that seem to need a lot of hand holding at the beginning, but after coding and having a few small wins start to ease at the test and then they can surprise you with very nice coding or interactions on solutions.

That is true, because it was my motivation to build a wizard for behavioural interviews designed to remove biases and be objective. In practice, most of the time people are not even sure what they are looking for - I know it when I see it - and default to gut hiring. This leads to teams made of people that think like you, so you're basically paying 2 salaries for one brain.

My formula for removing biases is in 2 steps: first define explicitly the behavioural traits you desire, and second, use falsifiable questions to determine the truth.

Because we're here to help each other, if this is relevant to you, I'd be happy to share this solution with you.

Yes, please!

Give me a sign and I would be happy to give you a tour

Mostly your goals align with "being fair", but not always, and that's OK.

Given the power that companies have over individual workers, I'd say that a job interview should be treated as seriously as a court case. So yes, making it fair should be an explicit goal.

I'm not asserting there's a specific bias in this particular interview choice, but I am asserting that if you were taking a fairly narrow part of the population you better be working damned hard that you don't have hiring biases that are not relevant to job performance

I think that if you have money for recruiting then you can screen with an initial test, then pay them for a few hours or days of additional tests. And then ideally there is a contracting period that is an additional test but on a real project.

A cooperative multiplayer game is also going to be a similar soft skills check that favors people that can communicate not just well, but also charismatically.

That said, a possible advantage to doing that in a game, as opposed to a regular soft skills interview (or worse trying to force such soft skill checks into the pressure cooker of a whiteboard interview or puzzle questions) is that you maybe provide an environment where the interviewee can be dopamine hacked into believing they can relax and you maybe get a glimpse into how the person's soft skills check out on the other side of that boundary where interviewee knows that they need to be "on" and acting.

I'm not actually sure if that is good or bad, but a lot of my takeaway from this article and other comments in these threads is it sort of feels like there's a lot of excuses for "pick a game that seems technically similar", but most of the "good feedback" that seems to be coming back from these experiences resembles what history tells us about regular interviews versus technical interviews: soft skills matter a lot more than what you can gauge technically in an interview. Most technical interviews are just soft skills interviews under the pressure cooker of taking a non-standardized pop quiz your professor decided you need to take because you showed up to class in only your underwear (and also you are flying for some reason in this nightmare). Cooperative games possibly present the opposite of the pressure cooker: dopamine hacking the interviewee an excuse to let the pressure seem like it is off while you are still doing that same sort of soft skills check.

(Aside: problem solving is classically a "soft skill". "Behavioral interviews" were as much about problem solving decades before the software industry invented the "technical" interview.)

(Further aside: This sort of dopamine hacking is very familiar to anyone that's seen Fraternity/Sorority rushes. Soft skills are hugely important for "group fit"/"team fit" in college social groups as they are in employment groups, and seeing how potential new members interact in "fun"/"game" situations often tells you more about the person than if you sat down and interviewed them one-on-one in a suit and tie or equivalent and they know they have to be "on". Rushes include both of those things for many reasons.)

Can you clarify: what is "ML" here? "Machine learning", ML the language, MatLab, "machine language" (a.k.a. assembly), Matt LeBlanc? I'm out of ideas...

However, I think playing this game would be a fun and interesting interview.

The companies that think deeply about interviews are aware that their interview is biased, and they do so intentionally. At a certain point watching 5 good engineers not meet the bar is better than having 10 bad engineers get through.

Maybe the 'right answer' is to let your needs drive the bias of your interview. Do you have a position that needs to deal with immense pressure with management breathing down their neck? Bias your selection with whiteboard interviews. Are you looking for a principal engineer that can drive adaptation and change in a large org? Bias your selection process to get that.

tl;dr Maybe the issue is the one size fits all thinking to the tech interview.